October 2, 2014Theater Review The World of Extreme Happiness by Betty Mohr One doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry over The World of Extreme Happiness. The misnamed play offers a comic take on serious issues, depicts its characters in cartoonish stereotypes, and comes to an abrupt conclusion for which nothing prepares us. Written by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, the play, now at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, focuses on the 1992-2012 period of China’s rural-to-city transformation in which large numbers of peasants left farm communities in favor of industrialized cities. The play, which will go to the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York early next year, centers on Sunny (Jennifer Lin). An unwanted daughter (next to the Mideast, China is one of the most misogynist countries in the world); her father (Donald Li) dumps her into a slop bucket with the expectation that she will die. But Sunny refuses to die and grows up to work on the farm to pay for her younger brother’s (Ruy Iksandar) schooling. Seeing no future for herself, she leaves the farm and moves to the city where she gets a job cleaning toilets in a factory. She wants to move up and is mentored by a co-worker (Jo Mei) who introduces her to self-improvement night courses. When none of the self-improvement lessons help her get her a promotion, she resorts to old-fashioned sex tactics to persuade her boss (Francis Jue) to give her a supervisory job. Sunny gets her big break, though, when she is chosen to portray “the average factory girl” in a documentary made by a corporate promoter (Jodi Long). She’s very excited but, suddenly in the midst of a speech, and for no reason, decides to call for a protest. What is she protesting? Is she protesting the totalitarian Communist State as is being done right now by pro-democracy students in Hong Kong? Or, as some reviewer has suggested, she is protesting against capitalism. That can’t be the case, however, because the Chinese State runs everything; if the state tells companies what they should do, what they can produce, and what they're allowed to charge-- then it's not capitalism. Government control of companies and an economy is socialism, fascism, or communism—never capitalism. It’s none of the above, though; Out of left field, Sunny calls for a protest against the factory where she works, and where she has gotten a promotion and a raise. There is so much that Cowhig could have done to lift the lid off the Chinese police state, but she doesn’t seem interested in the millions who died under Mao or the misery of China’s Communist dictatorship. Moreover, the character of Sunny is such a caricature that it’s difficult to care about her. And it doesn’t help that director Eric Ting veers from farce to tragedy in such a heavy-handed manner that the play's theme sometimes gets lost. The World of Extreme HappinessWhen: Through October 12, 2014Where: Owen Theatre, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St., ChicagoTickets: $10-$40Information: Call 312.443.3800 or visit www.GoodmanTheatre.org